A Serious Man makes comedy out of a crisis

He never questions his Jewish faith and continually searches for some kind of clarity in life. But the more he searches, the more puzzling it becomes.

The three rabbis he consults are worse than useless and it seems almost impossible to "receive with simplicity everything which happens to you".

He is informed by his wife (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him for a pompous friend (Fred Melamed), though he is relieved to note there has not yet been any "whoopsie-doopsie".

Meanwhile, his unemployable brother (Richard Kind) is in trouble with the police for gambling, his bar mitzvah-age son (Aaron Wolff) has problems at school and his sulky daughter (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet to procure a nose job.

That isn’t all. At work, he has to deal with an Asian student trying to bribe him for a passing grade, and the boy’s father suing him for defamation if he doesn’t take the bribe and keep quiet.

There is also the little matter of an anonymous letter writer sabotaging his prospects of tenure.

Alan Mandell, Simon Helberg and George Wyner are marvellous as the trio of useless rabbis — as is Alan Arkin as Gopnik’s divorce lawyer, who sends him a large bill for doing nothing.

It is a very funny process, the directorial touches supplemented by acting that mixes parody with realism. (If anybody but Jewish directors made the film, they would be accused of anti-semitism.)

The whole fiasco is set within the kind of society the Coens themselves negotiated when young. At times you wonder how they managed to remain even vaguely sane.

But it isn’t just a comedy — the serious edge of human enquiry is there too. How on earth do we negotiate a path through life’s pitfalls and absurdities?

There’s no real answer given, but then the Coen brothers have never been known as philosophers. They are, however, pretty smart film-makers.

A Serious Man
Cert: 15